The Night Listener : A Novel (9 page)

“She must
really
blow,” I said.

Pete exploded with laughter, which delighted me until it led to a bout of coughing that I thought would never stop. “Fuck, man,” he said, gasping for breath. “You gotta give me warning.”

“Sorry.” I waited for him to compose himself. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I think you should go with it, you know. Start your own tradition.”

“What?”

“‘Roberta Blows.’ Just say that instead of ‘Merry Christmas.’”

“Right.”

“Really. Think about it. It’s got a great sound to it. Euphonious.

It’s like something out of Poe. And it would put some meaning back in the season: ‘Roberta Blows and a Happy New Year!’”

“Man, you are weird.”

“What else?”

“What else what?”

“Is in your room?”

“Oh…lotsa nasty medical shit.”

“Okay. Go on.”

“That’s it, except some lamps and stuff. And some comic books in plastic milk crates.”

“You like comics?”

“Not anymore.”

“Grew out of it, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I had a friend who loved comics, and he was forty.” For two weeks, Wayne, remember? You were forty for two crummy little weeks, and that was all the middle age you could take.

I met Wayne Stevens at Harvey Milk’s memorial service. Wayne had slept with Harvey three times in the last month of Harvey’s life.

The day the supervisor was assassinated at City Hall Wayne heard the news at work and stumbled home in disbelief to find a flirty message from Harvey that Wayne’s roommate had taken that morning. At the memorial service, Wayne knew no one (including the three official “widows” in attendance), so he took the seat next to me. “You’re Gabriel Noone,” he said, and I held his hand for the next hour. A week later, when I ran into him in North Beach, I felt as if I’d always known him.

Wayne was blond and twenty-five then, with the face of a happy rabbit and a sleek superhero chest that startled you when his shirt came off. He was very bright in an obsessive adolescent sort of way.

He filled composition books with annotated lists of his favorite things, which invariably included what he called the Four B’s: Batman, Bette Davis, Busby Berkeley, and Bette Midler. I know how that sounds, but Wayne was no dreary queen doing bad Baby Jane impersonations. He had a serious gift for criticism, and he could analyze in depth the very essence of the artists he admired. Including, I should add, me.

We were lovers in the beginning, but it never took. Wayne wanted The Great Dark Man, and I, typically, wasn’t up to it. We lived together for a while in a flat below Coit Tower—”in its pubic hair,” as Wayne put it—and even after the sex had died we indulged in sentimental gestures. I would wake late, long after Wayne had left for one of his clerical jobs downtown, to find an index card propped on the kitchen table bearing some fragment of a thirties song and a line of X’s and O’s. It was Wayne’s way of honoring the big romantic love that neither of us had ever achieved. And it was I who ended this gentle charade, suggesting cautiously one night that we might both find what we wanted if Wayne took a recently vacated studio across the Filbert Steps.

I worried that I’d destroyed something precious, but we grew even closer. Wayne became my best friend and disciple, my randy little brother. We would hang out all night, smoking doobies and excoriating the celebrity closet cases we could spot on television. Or we’d head off to our separate hunting grounds (Wayne to a leather bar, I to the glory holes), knowing that later we would offer each other our exploits—if I may quote myself here—”like a small dog who drags a dead thing home and lays it on the doorstep of someone he loves.” Wayne’s new digs across the garden were a study in monastic simplicity. He adhered, he said, to the Andy Warhol dictum that all you needed for happiness was one of everything: one bed, one chair, one spoon, one mug. Wayne’s one book-of-the-moment (Wilkie Collins, say, or Isherwood or sometimes Nancy Mitford) was always placed symmetrically on his coffee table, often in the company of a lone comic book. I felt peaceful when I sat in that musty little room with its treasured Batman lithograph and its pristine row of tea boxes above the electric kettle. Wayne lived hand-to-mouth, bouncing checks until they finally landed, but he had learned to revere the ordinary. He was almost English in that regard; he had distilled the dailiness of life until it was pure as a sacrament.

And he was such a sunny guy. He could find the humor in catastrophe, thereby romanticizing it and robbing its power. I could do that myself, but Wayne was the acknowledged master. I knew he had his dark moments, but he played them offstage, until the worst had passed. His instinct was to connect with others, to make them characters in his lifelong comic book, to find some comfortable common ground, however tenuous, and inhabit it completely. A lot of people—Jess among them—would call that conflict avoidance, but I never understood what was wrong with that.

I worried about hurting Wayne’s feelings when Jess and I became a couple. Wayne, after all, had been my companion for seven years.

He had been my steady date for the movies, my confessor when a romance hit the rocks. He had joined me on a cruise ship to Alaska and later on my first British book tour, a laughably down-market affair we conducted out of a gay boardinghouse in Earl’s Court. And still later we had rented a cottage in the Cotswolds, where we lived for six weeks without a car, so we could feel like a couple of loopy villagers out of E. F. Benson.

As usual, my fear of hurting someone had made me overestimate my own importance. Jess and Wayne got along fine, and their bond grew even stronger when they both tested positive. As the decade came to a close the three of us were braced against the beast, intent upon collecting memories while we could. To that end, we rented a villa on Lesbos one fall. We wanted to feel like Coward and company lolling on the lawn at Goldenhurst, or maybe Auden on Ischia, ogling boys among the ruins. (We were already aspiring to the proud nobility of twentieth-century queers.) I can still see that old stone house: its tangle of dusty wisteria, the amber light that shot through its shutters during afternoon naps.

We had brought along a compact disc player—this nifty new thing—and we would lie on our terrace above the Aegean, adrift in a musical we had just learned to call
Les Miz
. It never failed to break our hearts, since we had made it about us: loving comrades huddled at the barricades. One lyric in particular demolished me: “Oh, my friends, my friends, forgive me, that I live and you are gone. There’s a grief that can’t be spoken, there’s a pain goes on and on.” Jess and Wayne contracted pneumocystis at the same time. We saw this as the first of many trials, so we were frugal with our distress. I learned to take their coughing in stride, waiting calmly without comment for it to stop, so as not to honor its message. They both lost a lot of weight. Jess had always been buxom—there is no better word—but now you could see the planes of his skull, the disturbing way his butt had begun to deflate (a fact I refused to confirm for him). And there were the usual ills: the fatigue and neuropathy, the night sweats and diarrhea. So we adjusted again; talked of plays we had yet to see, trips we had yet to take. Wayne even visited my sister, Josie, in Charleston, and walked the beach with her on Sullivan’s Island, since they had become friends over the years.

Then a sort of edgy competition began. I thought of it at the time as a “sicker than thou” thing, with Wayne as the instigator. He would stack up his symptoms against Jess’s, matching him hardship for hardship, then do him one better with a look of flinty triumph. He seemed to be saying: “Stop pretending we’re equals; I’m going to die before you do.” And so help me, I remember regarding him as a troublemaker, a bad sport.

As it happened, they both recovered from their pneumonia, but Wayne got KS and began to lose ground. He grew thinner and thinner, and during his third prolonged stay in the hospital they drove a shunt—this gleaming vampire stake—into his beautiful chest, as if intent upon proving him mortal. His parents came out from Florida several times, armed with false cheer and new editions of the toys Wayne had loved as a child. He seemed to glory in it, this last chance to be babied and fussed over, after so many years of brave bachelorhood. He would hold court in bed, encircled by his plastic trains and Lincoln Logs, beaming like some skeletal holy man.

He wanted to go home after that, to refine his solitude again. But his frailty and that alpine stairway made shopping, or even leaving the house, a near-impossibility. Then one week he stopped returning my messages. Jess and I went to the Steps and found him in a stupor amid the fouled sheets of his sofa bed. When we rolled him over, he smiled at us with sheepish apology, as if we’d just stopped him from snoring, or woken him from a bad dream. The ambulance attendants didn’t know the Coit Tower approach, so they had to haul him down through the garden to Montgomery Street.

Later, when Jess and I were on a book tour in Britain, Wayne collapsed in the bushes. Our friends Seneca and Vance discovered him by chance when they arrived with groceries, then took him back to their place on Potrero Hill, where they cared for him like a wounded robin until he was stronger.

We looked into hospices, but Wayne resisted. This was just another bad patch, he said, and it would pass. But he had run out of money and was months behind in his rent, and there was no way a caregiver could operate in that cramped warren. Even after he agreed to a hospice (swayed by its vegetarian meals and the Zen Buddhist staff), he spoke of his return to the Steps. There was no
need
to give up his apartment, he argued; his landlady had agreed to charge him a nominal sum until he was better. This was a flat-out lie, one of his rare ones, but easy enough to fathom: to surrender that little room, however useless it had become, was to acknowledge the end.

So we moved him to a hospice in the Castro called Maitri and made cheerful noises about its homey atmosphere. (I remembered doing the same when we moved my grandmother into the Live Oaks Convalescent Home.) There was greenery outside his window, after all, and they let us cover his walls with talismans from home, his Rocky and Bullwinkle cel, his etching of Telegraph Hill in the thirties, that Batman lithograph. It was there we held his fortieth birthday party. His parents were on hand for it, and Seneca and Vance brought lots of silly little presents, for the joy of the unwrapping. Jess and I had pulled strings with a friend in L.A. and scored an advance copy of Bette Midler’s latest movie,
Hocus Pocus
.

Twenty minutes into it, Wayne issued his last review in a tone of wide-eyed disbelief. “This is really shitty,” he said.

We made up for it the day before he died. Jess and I brought him our tape of Midler’s
Art or Bust
concert, Wayne’s favorite. He could no longer speak, but we propped him up in bed, and when the Divine appeared on-screen bouncing a giant inflatable boob over her head, a beatific smile bloomed on his face. Toward the end of the concert, Jess and I held each other and wept. “Here comes the flood,” Bette was singing, and it felt like a dirge for our friend, the saddest song we had ever heard. But Wayne’s death was easier to take because Jess was there, and because, in the depths of my calculating heart, it was only a rehearsal for something much worse to come.

I had been so angry at Wayne those last few weeks. Anger was the easier emotion, and Wayne had left a snarl of unfinished business and petty debts that intruded bluntly upon our grief. And when we cleaned out his apartment, his life of Spartan simplicity had proven a fraud. In a basement storeroom beneath his monk’s cell lay every scrap of paper Wayne had ever received: every dinner bill, every playbill and postcard, every thought he’d ever scribbled on a cocktail napkin. There were thousands of comics, too—
Batman
mostly—stored in decapitated cereal boxes. I’d always assumed he’d traded one comic for another, but they were all there, every last one of them, there and in a rented space downtown, where Jess and I spent days sifting through the litter that Wayne had left as an auto-biography. We ended up saving the comic books and anything that resembled a journal, then dumped the rest.

I felt as if I’d finished him off with a pillow to the face.

“Did you ever like comics?” Pete asked.

“Not really. Not the kind my friend liked.”

“What kind was that?”

“Oh…guns and explosions and big butch guys in tights.” Pete laughed.

“Little Lulu was more my speed. She operated by her wits, and she wanted no part of the boys and their stupid games. Even when they put up a sign on the playhouse that said ‘No Girls Allowed.’”

“You didn’t like boys?”

“Not many of them, no.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. We just weren’t wired the same way.” For the rest of the day I thought about Wayne, the grownup boy who had brought me childhood again, minus the usual terrors. At dusk I drove to Telegraph Hill and parked in the lot at Coit Tower.

The sky was conch-shell pink over the Golden Gate, and there were surprisingly few tourists around to spoil it. (I remembered how cross Wayne would get whenever the line of cars stretched down as far as his place.) I followed the rock-walled path to the Steps and stood watching the sunset as it winked off the windows in the East Bay, like a thousand little wildfires. Beneath that lay Treasure Island, a source of wonder to Wayne, since it had been built for a world’s fair in 1939, and that particular year, in his opinion, had been the high point of the century. Deco had been in bloom then, he said, and it was the best year ever for movies:
Gone With the Wind, Dark Victory, Rebecca, The Wizard of Oz
.

I opened the gate to his garden. There were several purple petals on the Princess tree, but the rose we had planted over his ashes (in homage to the Midler ballad) was looking less than divine. I hadn’t been here in at least two years, this sacred spot that had once been central to my life. I had always been on the move, a serial renter leaping from hilltop to hilltop in search of home. Now the Steps were another realm completely, which was odd, considering how little they had changed. I was the one who had changed, growing grayer and sadder in the midst of this immutable beauty. But I was alive and well. Shouldn’t that be enough?